Monday, June 25, 2012

Free Time and Time Zone Bugs

We have just updated the SARWeather production servers again. This time we have made changes related to selecting forecast periods and corrected some time-zone bugs.

Period Selection

Most notably, you can now select the starting time for the forecast, so you can request a forecast for the hike starting tomorrow morning, without having to forecast the uninteresting period leading up to that.

The length of the forecast is now independent of the forecast type, so you can finally request those 5 day 1km forecasts, or that 3-hour forecast at 9km resolution. Just beware that large, long-running, high-resolution forecasts can become a bit costly.The above changes required us to change how the forecasts are priced. Each forecast type now has an initial price and a price per hour of forecast time. The formula will work out to almost exactly the same prices as before for settings matching the list of options we previously offered.

Time-Zone Handling

We have also fixed a couple of bugs in time-zone handling. Most notably, the time on the green time-slider had a tendency to show GMT time instead of the user's configured time-zone. This has been fixed, but you are still required to be logged in for the time-zone setting to have any effect.

Other

We have also changed the way forecasts are listed, so they are now always shown with size and resolution.